Wouldn't it be great if healthy food drew a crowd for a change? Here's how.

There's one at every party. A wan, overlooked pile of carrots and celery spread around a dip that's filled with tortilla chip shards and wing sauce streaks. Here, five surefire ways to take crudités off the sidelines and move them to center stage.

1. Go Beyond Green Celery and Orange Carrots Already

As #TheDress proved, color theory can be a pretty powerful way to attract an audience. Think of vegetables as a paint set. Play with colors. Try an all-white platter of cauliflower, fennel, and white asparagus. Or go with a rainbow, starting with red peppers at one end and purple radishes at the other. Both would go great with a white blue cheese dip like this one—and in a worse case scenario, at least you've got a pretty pile at the end of the party.

2. Theme Your Crudités to Your Dip

Some folks just hate vegetables. But everyone loves dip. So hide that bag of chips, pick an approachable vegetable and pair it with the kinds of dips people can't get enough of—the rich, spicy, creamy kinds. Pair pea pods with this spicy Thai peanut dip or go Greek with cucumber spears and spiced labneh.

3. Crushed Ice Makes Everything Fancy

We eat with our eyes first, right? And rather than spreading out your cut produce on a big ol' plate, take a cue from the catering companies and buy a bag of ice for five bucks. Smash it up, spread it out over a large shallow bowl and wedge your bowl of dip in the middle. We like this Potted Crab and Meyer Lemon dip with some Romaine hearts for some high class-looking eats.

4. Remember, Pickles Are Vegetables, Too

Who says your crudités have to be raw? Adjust a pickle recipe like this one to suit your taste, cut whatever vegetables you want to use into a dip-worthy shape, and pair them with a fattier dip to balance out the acid. You can even do this a week before the party. We like pickling not-so-spicy poblanos with this Hatch Chile Con Queso Dip.

5. Meet Endive, Nature's Version of the Scoop Chip

Often overlooked in the produce section as that fancy-looking lettuce meant for salads, endive has a beautiful color and is the perfect shape for crudités—it's rigid and already shaped into scoop, so it can scrape up every last morsel. You can even spread a dip into it, like a cracker. And because it's bitter, endive can hold up to really strong dips. Like this one.